Photo: Omar Marques / Getty Images
By: Real America News Updated 26 Feb 2022, 20: 54 pm EST
Almost 120,000 people have fled from Ukraine to Poland and other neighboring countries following the Russian invasion, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Saturday.
The number was rising rapidly as Ukrainians grabbed their belongings and ran to escape the deadly Russian attack on their nation, including the attempt to seize by storming Kiev, the capital.
Poland has declared its border open to fleeing Ukrainians, even those without official documents.
Saturday, a Polish government official also said that the country has sent a hospital train that will pick up those wounded in the war in Mostyska, in western Ukraine, and will take them to Warsaw for treatment, according to CBS News.
The hospital train departed from the border city of Przemysl and has five cars adapted to transport the wounded and four provided with humanitarian aid for the Ukrainian district of Lviv.
According to reports, some Ukrainian men were also returning to Ukraine from Poland to take up arms against Russian forces. However, they were exceptions in what is mainly an exodus from Ukraine.
“Almost 116,000 have crossed borders international so far. This may increase, it is changing every minute,” said Shabia Mantoo, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “It is very fluid and changes every hour”.
The agency hopes that up to 4 million Ukrainians may flee if the situation deteriorates further.
Those arriving are mostly women, children and the elderly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy banned men of military age on Thursday leave the country.
Mantoo said most headed to neighboring Poland, Moldova, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, and even some to Belarus , from where some Russian forces entered Ukraine.
He did not immediately have details on the figures by country, but the largest number of people was arriving in Poland, where some 2 million Ukrainians have already settled down to work in recent years, frightened off by Russia’s first incursions into Ukraine in 1200 and seeking op opportunities in the flourishing economy of the neighbor of the European Union.
The Polish government said on Saturday morning that more of 100,000 Ukrainians crossed the border between Poland and Ukraine in the last 48 hours.
At the Medyka border crossing, a queue of vehicles waiting to enter Poland stretched 15 kilometers ( 9 miles) to Ukraine, according to people who crossed the border, reported the Polish broadcaster TVN24.
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